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Introduction

‘I write a little and cross out a lot’, Chopin wrote to his sister during the composition of his final major work, the Cello Sonata in G minor Op 65, written in Paris in 1845 and 1846. ‘Sometimes I am pleased with it, sometimes not. I throw it into a corner and then pick it up again.’ No work of his gave him more trouble, as manifested by the extensive sketches. It was the last one to be published during his lifetime, written when his health was failing. The four movements (Allegro moderato, Scherzo, Largo and Allegro) show how far Chopin had developed in his ability to form a closely integrated sonata structure, with ideas developing from a variety of short but related motifs.

For some of Chopin’s contemporaries it was a difficult work to grasp. Moscheles found ‘passages which sound to me like someone preluding on the piano, the player knocking at the door of every key and clef, to find if any melodious sounds were at home’, yet he thought well enough of it to make an arrangement for piano four hands. The Allegro moderato, especially, puzzled even Chopin’s intimates—players today find it the most problematic in terms of balance—and he omitted the movement at the premiere given by himself and Franchomme, the work’s dedicatee, on 16 February 1848. This first movement clearly had some hidden significance for him. Various commentators have noted in it thematic references from Schubert’s Winterreise, notably the initial phrase of ‘Gute Nacht’, the opening song. The subject of the song-cycle, the disappointed lover in despair at leaving his beloved, would seem to reflect the circumstances of Chopin’s life when he was writing the Sonata. There is evidence that he turned to Winterreise at the time of his separation from George Sand. Could that be why the first movement was not played at the premiere? Is that why on his deathbed he asked Franchomme to play it but could not bear to hear more than the opening bars?

Recordings

This recording of two great Romantic cello sonatas features the mercurial duo of cellist Alban Gerhardt and pianist Steven Osborne, both musicians of dazzling technical and interpretative abilities. Gerhardt is known for his passionate commitment to ...» More

Two works from very different composers: Chopin’s works for cello were few and far between, but these two straddle his compositional life: the Introduction and Polonaise was written in 1829 when he was just 19, and the cello sonata in (1845-6) is ...» More

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. This monumental recording project—first instigated by t ...» More

In 1845–6, Chopin’s music was going through radical stylistic changes, which included increasing prevalence of contrapuntal textures, flexibility of metre and sophistication of harmony. All of these can be summed up for the non-professional by saying that together they constitute an attempt to cultivate an increasing density of musical argument and to replace the blatant with the subtle.

A good example is the slow third movement, Largo, of the Sonata. Here Chopin begins with an attractively soulful tune on the cello that could easily have come from one of his earlier nocturnes, immediately echoed by the piano. But what sounds initially like a straightforward interchange of melody between the instruments soon takes on a more complex character: the piano starts repeating different parts of the cello line, and then develops its own continuation; the cello sometimes accompanies, sometimes strides off on its own. It eventually becomes clear that instead of a routine Romantic melody divided between the instruments, we are dealing with a decidedly slick piece of two-part counterpoint, in which neither player consistently holds the centre-stage, and in which the interchange of voices is ever unpredictable.

It may well take repeated listening to follow exactly what Chopin is doing here and elsewhere, for the same fluidity of approach pervades the entire Sonata. Some of Chopin’s contemporaries were baffled by this, even fellow musicians. The notoriously conservative composer Ignaz Moscheles heard Chopin play through the piece soon after it was finished, and was downright puzzled by ‘passages which sound to me like someone preluding on the piano, the player knocking at the door of every key and clef to find if any melodious sounds are at home’. Alas for Moscheles, one of the reasons that more of Chopin’s music than his own is played today is that Chopin was constantly concerned to avoid compositional clichés, and to present us with something new. Sometimes the apparent ‘difficulty’ of music such as this can be the key to its survival.

Novelty permeates the whole Sonata. In the G minor first movement, the piano’s flourish before the entrance of the cello turns out not to be a standard throwaway introduction, but an important part of the subsequent structure. It returns several times later, like punctuation, to articulate the sections of this tightly argued sonata form—to tell us, so to speak, where we are in the movement. The Scherzo second movement begins with a typically trenchant, rhythmic theme, but quickly sidesteps the square repetitions often found in such pieces in favour of a much more plastic, and much less predictable, piling together of short, memorable motifs into longer phrases. By the time we reach the Allegro finale, in a slightly more compact sonata form than the first movement, it might come as a jolt in itself that Chopin concludes the whole work in the standard bravura fashion—with a turn to the brighter tonic major key and a scurrying, virtuoso coda. It takes quite a composer to make the expected seem so utterly unexpected.